Congo Square, New Orleans

Assembled from 25 blocks · 1 evidence · 25 related

1. Story
2. An open ground on the far side of Rampart Street from the French Quarter, in what is now Louis Armstrong Park in the Tremé, where enslaved and free people of African descent gathered on Sunday afternoons to drum, dance, sing and trade. Under French and Spanish rule enslaved people in Louisiana had customary Sunday time off; after the Louisiana Purchase the city moved to control rather than abolish the practice, and in 1817 a municipal decree confined such gatherings to this single plot. That is the paradox the site records: the same order that restricted the gatherings licensed them, so drumming survived in New Orleans, legally and in public, at a time when it was proscribed elsewhere in the United States. Contemporary observers describe crowds numbering in the hundreds by 1819 and name the instruments and dances, among them the bamboula and its associated pattern counted as three plus three plus two — the asymmetric timeline that runs through Caribbean and later New Orleans music. The gatherings continued into the mid-nineteenth century. Congo Square is not the birthplace of jazz, a claim it is frequently made to carry; it is documentary evidence that African ensemble practice was still being performed in North America within living memory of the people who made jazz.
3. Knowledge
4. The West African drum ensemble
5. Congo Square, New Orleans
6. New Orleans
7. Connections
8. The West African drum ensemble
9. New Orleans
10. New Orleans confines Sunday gatherings to Congo Square
11. Colonial prohibition of drumming
12. West Africa
13. Congo Square, New Orleans
14. The Stono Rebellion
15. The South Carolina Negro Act prohibits drums
16. New Orleans confines Sunday gatherings to Congo Square
17. The Middle Passage
18. Congo Square, New Orleans
19. Jazz
20. Havana
21. New Orleans confines Sunday gatherings to Congo Square
22. The first jazz record is made
23. Alan Lomax records Jelly Roll Morton at the Library of Congress
24. Evidence
25. Enslaved and free people of African descent gathered on Sundays at the ground beyond Rampart Street to drum, dance, sing and trade; an 1817 municipal measure confined such gatherings to that plot; observers describe the bamboula and a pattern counted as three plus three plus two, and crowds of several hundred by 1819. V55 verification basis: retrieved in search summary across several public-history accounts; none was opened, and the 1817 measure is described in them variously as an ordinance and as a mayoral decree.